It is playing to peoples fantasies and half-held beliefs. Its in the same league as cold-reading and sayances. For the most part I feel that people can believe what they like, so long as they can take reasonable criticism. However, this website is made of better stuff and I'm chatting away here merely to draw attention so that this thread might be closed down...

... which is a poor negative motive. The guys pushing this have proposed a physics theory to explain all this so this isn't just a Keshe fantasy dream. Now it maybe the physics is fundamentally wrong somewhere and this goes nowhere but this thread would still be interesting even then in showing how new advanced physics theorems get proposed and either accepted or rejected in light of experimental data. It's up to negative guys like you to find flaws in either the theorem or the data rather than just point and laugh. People laughed at Newton and Einstein too because their ideas were so fantastic and so out of everyday experience. If however on the off chance this is all true, then well, NSF would have had yet another public scoop .

Actually, nobody probably ever laughed at the ideas of Newton and Einstein. Nor to be honest, do I hear much in the way of laughter in this thread either. My personal opinion has been that some ideas are relatively practical even to the point of having potential near future application while others are likely to never be developed.

It is playing to peoples fantasies and half-held beliefs. Its in the same league as cold-reading and sayances. For the most part I feel that people can believe what they like, so long as they can take reasonable criticism. However, this website is made of better stuff and I'm chatting away here merely to draw attention so that this thread might be closed down...

If you have an issue with it then you can always report it to a moderator. As this concept was originally included as part of NASA's breakthrough propulsion research then I see no reason why it shouldn't be here.

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SKYLON... The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's preferred surface-to-orbit conveyance.

Just a few quick comments as I only skimmed this last page and only have a few minutes:

mlorrey: "Jim, I've had more experience running up against the government classifying 'inconvenient' patent applications that you have any idea about."

Yes well, anyone familiar with the way the law is written, and why it is so written, has some sympathy here. The law is written to allow USG to "take" any technology they can convince the proper federal judge is in the nation's defense interests. That is fact beyond dispute. And as I believe I have already posted, there are many fields such as metallurgy that don't even grant patents anymore because USG takes EVERY useful technology and pays a settlement, rather than allow other nations access to what become "state secrets."

Marsavian: "The guys pushing this have proposed a physics theory to explain all this so this isn't just a Keshe fantasy dream."

To be clear, Dr. Woodward's discovery concerning how to connect Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GR) to Mach's Principle (so named by Einstein himself) came years before he began seeing technological applications for his theory. He was working on the origin of inertia issue, not propulsion engineering. His patents came years after his peer reviewed papers published in places like Foundations of Physics. Getting a patent granted means nothing with regards the technology is viable. Getting your theory past peer review is an entirely different matter. Dr. Woodward is a Ph.D in the history of gravity physics and anyone who reviews his publicly available work will be instantly impressed with the tremendous breadth and width of his knowledge, especially concerning General Relativity. He regularly demonstrates mastery in this subject, unlike those posting in this thread who claim to "overrule" others because they earned a masters degree.

Lampy: "As this concept was originally included as part of NASA's breakthrough propulsion research then I see no reason why it shouldn't be here."

Yes, in fact, in addition to being identified by Marc Millis as viable technology needing further research during the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project (BPP); until funding cuts at MSC, Tony Robertson was leading official NASA discovery science on the MLT. That work ended when VSE and all the budget cuts came along, because of the budget cuts--not because the technology seemed fictional. NASA reviewed all this years ago and chose to do this research because they know this is worth doing.

Finally, if I may offer my own aside here--this is the Advanced Concepts folder. The whole point of the folder is to consider future concepts that are not flying yet and perhaps never will. Of course there will be some dispute whether a technology that has yet to prove itself is a viable technology.

When I was contracted as a philosopher of technology to survey all the hair-brained propulsion schemes out there, and let me tell you there are more than a few; in order to identify any technologies that can be considered "emergent", I used two criteria to distinguish between what is seemingly legit, and what is garbage. I look for both a) consistent, peer-reviewed theory and b) empirical evidence. I'm pretty harsh in my judgements about what meets these criteria and after many long months came to the conclusion that ONLY Dr. Woodward's M-E theory met both my criteria. Some months afterward I found out that LockMart had done the same study (their "Millennial Study") and had come to the same conclusion.

So, if someone here wants to call this "Ooogie Booogie" science, I suggest you skip me and go hassle the Ph.D physicists at LockMart.

When I was contracted as a philosopher of technology to survey all the hair-brained propulsion schemes out there, and let me tell you there are more than a few; in order to identify any technologies that can be considered "emergent", I used two criteria to distinguish between what is seemingly legit, and what is garbage. I look for both a) consistent, peer-reviewed theory and b) empirical evidence. I'm pretty harsh in my judgements about what meets these criteria and after many long months came to the conclusion that ONLY Dr. Woodward's M-E theory met both my criteria. Some months afterward I found out that LockMart had done the same study (their "Millennial Study") and had come to the same conclusion.

So, if someone here wants to call this "Ooogie Booogie" science, I suggest you skip me and go hassle the Ph.D physicists at LockMart.

If I'm not mistaken Boeing also conducted their own AG studies but I think theirs was more along the line of the superconductor-related anomalies researched by Podlentkov. Thanks for the heads up about the Millenial Study, I didn't know the M-E theory was in there.

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SKYLON... The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's preferred surface-to-orbit conveyance.

My pleasure Lampy. BTW, Boeing did contact Podlentkov about his work and offered to bankroll some investigation there, but Pod wanted an ungodly amount of money, essentially to be treated as royalty. There have been others to contact Pod but there is still a vast disconnect between what's been claimed and what's been verified. There haven't ever been any verifications of Pod's work and since there is no theory to explain the effect claimed, I can't personally put much stock in it. There are just so many Russian frauds going around in the field that it makes no sense to invest. Same with the MAK study which is essentially a Searl rip-off. I once was talking with the American investor who was paying for the Russian MAK study. The Russians had quite a team on staff and some impressive hardware. Still, they had no results and like Searl, no theory to explain the claimed effect. I asked the investor "why would you invest in this research when it is obviously taken from Searl, and neither the Russian team nor Searl can give an explanation about why what they're doing ought to work?" He answered "they've never lied to me" but he couldn't answer how he knew the entire research program wasn't one big lie!

It's true that given the proper motivation, like money, many people will just believe what they want to believe. Searl, MAK, Pod, all looks like garbage to me.

Mastering space travel, meaning bringing in the same sorts of benefits we see in air travel, is right now a pipe dream. So long as we have rockets and nothing else, we do not have mastery. For mastery of space travel, we need at the least a "1 gee solution" meaning, spacecraft that can accelerate constantly in their travels. If we had a 1 gee solution spacecraft, we could be on the Moon in 4-5 hours, on Mars in 2-5 days, at the asteroids in 6 days, Jupiter in 7 and Saturn in 9 days. Without warping spacetime, a 1 gee solution would open up space travel to a new age and make it affordable for the average Joe.

If you had said 100 years ago that for the equivalent of what a 16 year old can make in 3 days labor, or a doctor or lawyer can make in an hour, that one could buy a ticket and fly across the continent in 4 hours; people would have thought you were crazy. But for space travel to ever be for the common man or woman, we need just this same sort of crazy solution.

Talking about Advanced Concepts is great fun but when it distracts us from more appropriate goals, it can do us harm. We ought to be thinking on the 1 gee solution. Thinking about colonizing other worlds without such a solution is an exercise in delusion, comparable to considering colonizing the Americans from Europe with a row boat. Yes, with a really great row boat you can cross the Atlantic but you can never make it so huge numbers of others can as well. Row boats just can't do what is needed and for colonization and neither can rockets.

I wonder what progress has been made with the test rigs? Is it all just electromagnetic interference or are we looking at real thrust? Even if this only ever gives us 0.01g that still gives us the solar system and possibly the stars.

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SKYLON... The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's preferred surface-to-orbit conveyance.

The latest on the rotator, which is not a thruster but only gives a way to observe M-E; is that the instrumentation amp got smoked week before last and is under repair and upgrade. I would not expect new rotator results in the next week. The work is also going forward on the UFG construction and on some filters, matching systems, etc. We're hoping to see some thrust measurements come from Fullerton before Dr. Woodward goes on extended vacation in mid May. I'll keep the forum posted as to any reportable results. However, it is fair to generalize that none of the results reported from Woodward's lab could have been E or M coupling, ion wind or thermal. The controls are all appropriate to demonstrate this. The issue is not the controls or protocols used. The issue is we just need to see more thrust. (More than 10 uN we hope. Perhaps in the 100's of uN.) Hoping for that in the first two weeks of May.

The latest on the rotator, which is not a thruster but only gives a way to observe M-E; is that the instrumentation amp got smoked week before last and is under repair and upgrade. I would not expect new rotator results in the next week. The work is also going forward on the UFG construction and on some filters, matching systems, etc. We're hoping to see some thrust measurements come from Fullerton before Dr. Woodward goes on extended vacation in mid May. I'll keep the forum posted as to any reportable results. However, it is fair to generalize that none of the results reported from Woodward's lab could have been E or M coupling, ion wind or thermal. The controls are all appropriate to demonstrate this. The issue is not the controls or protocols used. The issue is we just need to see more thrust. (More than 10 uN we hope. Perhaps in the 100's of uN.) Hoping for that in the first two weeks of May.

Lampy & G/I Thruster:

Dr. Woodward's rotary experiment has already nailed down the existence of a mass fluctuation like signal that can be used to generate a unidirectional force, as demonstrated by the data plots I previously posted on this web site. And his 2002 IIT experimental results clearly demonstrated a 1.2% weight loss in a 125 gram test article, which he believes and I concur represent the first clear demonstration of the Mach-Effect's wormhole term as is shown in the attached slide.

As to the maximum magnitude of the demonstrated G/I based thruster experiments, Dr. Woodward's Mach-Lorentz Thruster (MLT) tests never produced more than 10 micro-Newtons running at a drive frequency of ~50 kHz. And several tests at ~400 kHz and 2.0 MHz by three others experimenters provided null results due to the lack of bulk acceleration in those designs. However, my MLT-2004 running at 2.2 MHz, and Jim's and my Mach-2MHz running at 2.15 MHz and 3.80 MHz, which did allow for bulk acceleration of the MLT caps demonstrated thrust levels of up to 0.5 gram force or ~5.0 milli-Newtons back in the 2004 to 2006 time frame. These high frequency MLT test runs though were not performed in a vacuum, soft or hard, so some doubt about their validity still remains, but since the peak voltages in both test series never went over 200 V-peak, the likelihood of ion wind artifacts at these thrust levels is next to nil. Especailly considering that the Mach-2MHz test article was contained in a steel Faraday shield.

The techniques for scaling thrust for the MLT and UFG are different. The UFG for instance is fairly locked into its 40 kHz or so running frequency because the stacks used generally will not resonate at much higher frequency and thrust scales to the cube of frequency. So one way to generate more thrust with a UFG would be to use a shorter stack that operates at higher frequency. Even though you'd have half the ceramic and half the displacement and bulk acceleration, you could have 4X the thrust. That's what we'd like to see and I believe Jim has built a pair of shorter UFG stacks perhaps for this sort of investigation. Realize however that in most of these tests, it is the power equipment that is the real bear--impedance matching the power system--and these systems are all frequency locked. Jim doesn't have a $30K broadband impedance matcher (although he sure could use one and they're available.) It is most often these very practical electrical engineering matters that stand in the way of immediate progress. That's just what happens when you're working without funding. With even small, sub-million dollar funding the work would certainly be progressing far faster.

The techniques for scaling thrust for the MLT and UFG are different. The UFG for instance is fairly locked into its 40 kHz or so running frequency because the stacks used generally will not resonate at much higher frequency and thrust scales to the cube of frequency. So one way to generate more thrust with a UFG would be to use a shorter stack that operates at higher frequency. Even though you'd have half the ceramic and half the displacement and bulk acceleration, you could have 4X the thrust. That's what we'd like to see and I believe Jim has built a pair of shorter UFG stacks perhaps for this sort of investigation. Realize however that in most of these tests, it is the power equipment that is the real bear--impedance matching the power system--and these systems are all frequency locked. Jim doesn't have a $30K broadband impedance matcher (although he sure could use one and they're available.) It is most often these very practical electrical engineering matters that stand in the way of immediate progress. That's just what happens when you're working without funding. With even small, sub-million dollar funding the work would certainly be progressing far faster.

Folks:

I have a correction to my previous post from yesterday where I said that the MLT-2004 & Mach-2MHz test article's input voltages didn't exceed 200V-peak. That was incorrect for the MLT-2004, which had a peak voltage of ~600V-peak with a maximum generated thrust of ~0.46 gram-force per the attached slides.

I also need to note that the bulk acceleration requirement in the MLT-2004 was met by applying a thick potting like coating of silicone RTV around the cap-ring assembly and letting it cure before fiberglass taping and winding the #18 AWG toroidal B-field coil around the cap-ring. This buffer layer allowed the cap-ring to vibrated up and down along the Z-axis relative to the fixed B-field coil with the applied vxB Lorentz force, thus generating the required cap-ring bulk acceleration needed to express the M-E. For the Mach-2MHz MLT, the bulk acceleration requirement was met by mounting the entire cap-ring and coil assembly on a semi-flexible Plexiglas “Dog-Bone” mounting arm that allowed it to vibrate up and down with the applied vxB Lorentz force. Considering the frequency of these vibrations which are on the order of several MHz for either of these cases, and the small magnitude of the vxB forces generated running at these operating points, the magnitude of these cap-ring deflections were very small, being on the order of several microns, but apparently they were large enough to get the job done.

As to how to scale these G/I effects up into the Newton range and beyond, that will be a matter of following the rules set forth in the third attached slide, but also taking into account the newly appreciated need for large (tens to thousands of gees) simultaneously applied bulk accelerations that are phased locked to the rest of the system. We also need to find or develop high-k dielectrics that don't suffer from fatigue issues that currently limits the lifetime of these devices to just tens of minutes of operation without thermal annealing. In addition, when dealing with MLTs, if we could custom design a ceramic or single crystal dielectric material with a magnetic permeability greater than 10 that simultaneously provides a permittivity of 1,000 or greater with the low dissipation factor (DF) of Teflon (0.0002), we could generate very large MLT generated forces as shown in my last attached slide.

As to how to scale these G/I effects up into the Newton range and beyond

As I see it, you do not need to scale such effects to 1 Newton. Your biggest worry is to get however small, but real non-zero effects independently verified and accepted by other physicists.

As a scientist that is the appropriate course of action, and that topic was previously addressed with my previous submittals of Dr. Woodward's ongoing rotary Mach-Effect (M-E) based mass fluctuation experimental results that strongly supports his conjecture that mass fluctuation like effects exist, and that they may be engineered into viable propulsion technology. And yes, it would be prudent for multiple independent researchers to replicate the rotary proof of principle tests and do the same thing for the follow up MLT and UFG thrust producing devices. However, just as in the “cold fusion” fiasco, unless the independent experimenters follow the published M-E experimental cookbook precisely, their experimental results and conclusions from same may vary greatly.

BTW, the foregoing comments assume the core M-E participants currently understand ALL the important controlling parameters that govern the functioning of these M-E based devices, which the new bulk acceleration requirement has shown us is not the case at the moment. In other words, this G/I science building is large and our lighting candles are currently very small, but we can at least leave experimental breadcrumbs for others to follow...

Now, as an electrical engineer which is my first profession, I want to start building NOW, bigger and better M-E devices that will ultimately allow us to build the first WarpStar-1 G/I powered vehicle per my STAIF-2007 paper. And since this NASASpaceflight.com forum is more attuned to the later engineering venue, it deserves as much time as the former topic IMO.

As to how to scale these G/I effects up into the Newton range and beyond

As I see it, you do not need to scale such effects to 1 Newton. Your biggest worry is to get however small, but real non-zero effects independently verified and accepted by other physicists.

As a scientist that is the appropriate course of action, and that topic was previously addressed with my previous submittals of Dr. Woodward's ongoing rotary Mach-Effect (M-E) based mass fluctuation experimental results that strongly supports his conjecture that mass fluctuation like effects exist, and that they may be engineered into viable propulsion technology. And yes, it would be prudent for multiple independent researchers to replicate the rotary proof of principle tests and do the same thing for the follow up MLT and UFG thrust producing devices. However, just as in the “cold fusion” fiasco, unless the independent experimenters follow the published M-E experimental cookbook precisely, their experimental results and conclusions from same may vary greatly. ...Now, as an electrical engineer which is my first profession, I want to start building NOW, bigger and better M-E devices that will ultimately allow us to build the first WarpStar-1 G/I powered vehicle per my STAIF-2007 paper. And since this NASASpaceflight.com forum is more attuned to the later engineering venue, it deserves as much time as the former topic IMO.

Aren't you trying to skip a dozen steps in the ladder at once? If/when the effect is confirmed and accepted as real, there will be far more funding to continue the research, to understand the effect better, to test it in space, to build ships...

But now, people are not even convinced there is _any_ substance to these claims.

I don't think it's fair to say Paul wants to skip steps. He's just admitting he wants to build spaceships. :-) But just as he's said, the thing is to get others interested in independent replications. To date, those who have done replications like ORNL did not follow the proper construction nor consult properly with Jim Woodward. If they had, we would have had very different results. Those researchers also did not understand the theory so it is little surprise they did not accommodate bulk acceleration in their design. Conversely, Paul did consult with Jim and his thruster appears to have worked just fine.

The interesting thing to me about the upcoming UFG study is that hopefully we'll see one on the ARC Lite balance, in vacuum. That could easily provide evidence compelling enough to land a grant and see others do replication work. Most labs will not just pick up an unpaid project. If you want to see careful replications done, generally you have to have money to do them.

Aren't you trying to skip a dozen steps in the ladder at once? If/when the effect is confirmed and accepted as real, there will be far more funding to continue the research, to understand the effect better, to test it in space, to build ships...

But now, people are not even convinced there is _any_ substance to these claims.[/quote]

GoSpaceX:

“Aren't you trying to skip a dozen steps in the ladder at once?”

What, you don’t like a carrot to chase? After all that is the reason that I wrote my STAIF-2007 WarpStar-1 paper to begin with, i.e., to show the aerospace design community that there may be a much better way to skin the space fairing cat than just using rockets. However, it appears that most of the aerospace community wants a sure thing before they are willing to expend ANY effort of their own needed to understand the issues at hand and to further the cause with their own efforts.

“But now, people are not even convinced there is _any_ substance to these claims.”

I give you independent derived data, but you just want more. So what do you consider “substance” in regards to proving these observed M-E effects are REAL? Supporting experimental data from two or more different sources used to be considered substantiating support, but apparently that is no longer the case in 2009. So what will it take to prove the point to you and the rest of the skeptics in the world that the M-E or its QVF cousin is real and usable? Do the interested parties have to mature the technology on their own to the point of being able to levitating the test article in front of all of you before you are willing to even consider its use let alone how its done? It appears that is exactly what you are asking for. It reminds me of the fable about the little red hen and the loaf of bread she baked after much travail…

What, you don’t like a carrot to chase? After all that is the reason that I wrote my STAIF-2007 WarpStar-1 paper to begin with, i.e., to show the aerospace design community that there may be a much better way to skin the space fairing cat than just using rockets. However, it appears that most of the aerospace community wants a sure thing before they are willing to expend ANY effort of their own needed to understand the issues at hand and to further the cause with their own efforts.

“But now, people are not even convinced there is _any_ substance to these claims.”

I give you independent derived data, but you just want more. So what do you consider “substance” in regards to proving these observed M-E effects are REAL? Supporting experimental data from two or more different sources used to be considered substantiating support, but apparently that is no longer the case in 2009. So what will it take to prove the point to you and the rest of the skeptics in the world that the M-E or its QVF cousin is real and usable? Do the interested parties have to mature the technology on their own to the point of being able to levitating the test article in front of all of you before you are willing to even consider its use let alone how its done? It appears that is exactly what you are asking for. It reminds me of the fable about the little red hen and the loaf of bread she baked after much travail…

This forum isn't the place for publishing a paper or going through peer review. Write up a paper on the experiments, submit it to the AIAA for publication. Show both Jim and Paul's independent experiments agreed with each other, and how ORNL screwed up that prevented them from replicating.

Once thats done, write up some grant requests to fund more research, submit to the DoE, NASA, USAF, DARPA. Make sure the grant requests show info about chinese, russian, indian, or european efforts in this area, particularly with the USAF and DARPA grant requests.

Beyond that, try Bigelow for funding. His focus on ET and UFOs as the basis for his aerospace project means he's going to want some truly useful spacecraft propulsion, and he's got enough money that he doesn't have to care what people think about his motives. If you want to build spaceships, know your technology works, and dont care about near term approbium of the science community (once you prove it publicly the herd will all come around), thats the best way to go.

Internet forums and email lists, I have found, are not good places to try to attract support for breakthrough technologies. They are full of either kooks who have no pull and no money, or curmudgeons whose livelihoods are threatened by disruptive technologies.

"Internet forums and email lists, I have found, are not good places to try to attract support for breakthrough technologies. They are full of either kooks who have no pull and no money, or curmudgeons whose livelihoods are threatened by disruptive technologies."

I have to agree. Paul is just sharing his frustration that he's been at this for so long and we're not seeing the people with the purses respond, despite what seems unequivocal evidence on the rotator of Mach-Effects.

But personally, I think the best course of action is not to look for funding just yet. I think once more that Jim Woodward has got it right. Generate enough thrust under the proper conditions, meaning with the proper controls; such that you have a "demonstrator" then I think the world will be knocking on your door.

"Once thats done, write up some grant requests to fund more research, submit to the DoE, NASA, USAF, DARPA. Make sure the grant requests show info about chinese, russian, indian, or european efforts in this area, particularly with the USAF and DARPA grant requests."

I want to agree but here's the trouble: Jim is really doing pure research. Paul is an engineer who wants to build spaceships! but Jim is a physicist who wants to learn about how to handle Mach-Effects.

When one looks back over the work this last decade; there have been many discoveries and in particular, Jim is always altering his research in light of lessons learned. If one has a grant, one is locked into a specific course of action. You commit to a specific program and like it or not, even when you learn better, you are obliged to continue on toward the goals of the grant. So to be plain about this, Jim is better off without a grant until he's come to a point where he is really ready to be doing R&D as opposed to pure research.

We already know many of the steps necessary to build better thrusters. We know there are better materials we can use, higher frequencies, better COTS power equipment, different geometries, larger test articles. These are all R&D issues that have to do with prototyping and when we get to that point, we have lots of information about where to head. First however, we need a demonstrator.

BTW, anyone here who does regular technology searches, you'll want to avoid the latest garbage from Pravda about a propellantless thruster running on a satellite. Its a hook intended to plant a Trojan in your computer so beware what pages you open in that regard.